area 111 | zero volume

Studio Archea, Acoustic Barriers, Florence, Italy, 2007 - photo by Pietro Savorelli

Architecture of the infinite space.

The mission of an architecture magazine is to open new scenarios of reflection or to revive the discussion on open and topical issues by presenting, to the architectural debate, an annotated selection of case studies correlated to a specific critical action, considered relevant to contemporary activities. Convinced of the soundness of this approach, which differs from the request for exclusivity on the last project, or an uncritical collection-presentation of architecture (from this purely instrumental viewpoint the web is certainly more efficient) Area, with this issue – thematic as usual – aims to return to the question of sustainability of architecture within an entirely urbanized or built landscape by resorting to the original intuition introduced by Aldo Aymonino and Valerio Paolo Mosco in the volume “Contemporary public spaces: zero-volume architecture” published by Skira in 2008. The interest in that specific research is not solely linked to the theme of the public and/or collective space, a question which obviously requires a constant work of updating and reflection, but rather to the advisability of working on a planning dimension which leaves aside cubic volume, and in the final analysis the consumption and exclusive use of the ground according to an orientation which attributes behavioural – and thus ethical and social – values to architecture that may not be new but are certainly necessary. The works and actions of the architect may thus be liberated not so much of the spatial dimension – as a square, a park, the transformation of a shoreline in any case define a specific relational environment which may be identified in various ways – as of a measurability expressed in terms of cubic metres and exclusivity of the ground which is no longer freely accessible. It is, in the final analysis, a matter of interpreting any program of use and activity in such a way as to avoid occupying a volume which may be defined and enclosed, and expressed in different ways through a cubic volume which the authors have identified as inexistent or almost zero; a cubic volume which we may perhaps paradoxically consider as “infinite” because it is determined by a surface that is open or in any case indicative, due to its unlimited height. However, unlike the mathematical logic according to which a result approaching zero refers to a dimension that is diametrically opposed to a summation which tends to the infinite, in architecture an inexistent volume, a grain of sand, and an infinite volume,
the surrounding environment, coexist in the same place and may therefore coincide in spatial terms. But beyond terminological disputes and formulas, the difference with respect to the old concept according to which “architecture is the skilled play with volumes under the light” consists of the usability of the work, of the fact that it can be crossed, used, is accessible, has been conceived in such a way that the progressive and constant privatization of the territory does not continue to turn urban, or worse, natural space into the discards of a senseless building activity deprived of that “ecological” sensibility which zero-volume, or infinite, architecture proves to vaunt. In fact, once they have been built, zero-volume architectures can be used, walked across, and the best of such works often perfectly merge with a landscape which they themselves contribute to define.